Kosmischer Pitch

On his latest album, the German producer draws from the obsessed-over rock produced by his countrymen in the 1970s.

Jan Jelinek is fond of conceptual hooks. Going back to his Farben alias, tracks titles like "Live at the Sahara Tahoe, 1973" and "Farben Says: Love to Love You Baby" reinforced that project's excavation of dance music tropes, where snapshots of soul and disco appeared as sonic negatives. On name alone, Loop-finding-jazz-records hinted at a trip-hop spin through the Blue Note catalog but led instead to something far more abstract, as tiny grains of samples were placed under the sound equivalent of a high-powered microscope and stretched into unrecognizable shapes. La Nouvelle Pauvreté introduced Jelinek's "backing band" the Exposures, which turned out to be just another mischievous device for him to explore the signifiers of live performance in a controlled studio setting. This playfully cerebral approach has resulted in one of the more remarkable bodies of work in electronic music.

For Kosmischer Pitch, Jelinek draws from the obsessed-over rock produced by his German countrymen in the 1970s. Of Jelinek's experiments with reference and allusion, Kosmischer Pitch may well have the clearest lines between inspirational source and finished track, but the connections are still subtle. Two forces seem to be operating simultaneously and both stem from familiar Jelinek obsessions. First, motivation comes primarily from the minute detail found in the production of the source material, the way the instruments and studio engineering choices of a specific time and place fused to form the regional flavor of psychedelia that came to be called krautrock. A digital approximation of early synths like the gurgling Moog along with fragments of guitar are common to most pieces, which congeal into a thick, wooly texture.

The second notable feature is the strong focus on highly repetitious loops as the means of composition. Jelinek curiously avoids the obvious "motorik" metaphor and offers instead loose, overlapping phrases that suggest a machine bolted to the floor and gyrating in place. Trance-inducing repetition is constantly modulated by variations that hover on the threshold of audibility. "Universal Band Silhouette", for example, spins over and over through a progression that at first seems to be a static meditation on four grimy organ chords but actually grows steadily in intensity with each new cycle. As the music becomes progressively crowded time itself seems to stretch to allow for the inclusion of more sound, a peculiar and disorienting effect that's new to Jelinek's world and forms the basis of several tracks. It never gets old.

Again Jelinek has assembled an album designed to work as a whole, with a consistent palette and tracks that bleed one into the next. Not a single track on Kosmischer Pitch would sound correct placed on any another Jelinek album, which, at a time when so many great electronic producers seem to have become prisoners to their own sound, is a surpassing virtue. Down deep Jelinek has base aesthetic principals to guide him, but he's clearly unafraid of change. Let's hope future explorations lead somewhere this engaging.